


Victorian Arctic Adventure!

by jedishampoo



Category: Saiyuki
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Futuristic, M/M, Virtual Reality, age of exploration
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-15
Updated: 2016-01-15
Packaged: 2018-05-14 01:18:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5724103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jedishampoo/pseuds/jedishampoo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Who knew the electronic-reality entertainment business was so dangerous?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Victorian Arctic Adventure!

**Author's Note:**

  * For [whymzycal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/whymzycal/gifts).



> For the prompt “Age of Exploration,” at which I fail. Thanks to the lovely despina for the beta work. The only warning is for language.

Hakkai squidged his mop into the corner and soaked up the last of the pooled seawater just as the first flakes of snow began to fall.  
  
He took a few moments to tilt his head back and let the flakes alight upon his cheeks, which were heated from exertion. The air bit his lungs with every breath. He’d never been anywhere so cold in his life. It was glorious.  
  
The deck was all a-bustle. To one side of him the first lieutenant was shouting, both up at the men furling the sails in the tops and down at those working the capstan. Heavy clouds were rolling in to thicken the grey Arctic twilight, and though the icy cliffs on either side of their vessel glowed with their own Neptunian blue and green light, the passage was uncharted and the captain felt it safer to let down anchor until the storm had passed. Some of the men had groused that they’d be iced in by then, and here it was only mid-September!  
  
Hakkai was rather looking forward to it. He properly stowed his mop, saluted the lieutenant, and then went to search for Program Director Sanzo.  
  
He located him in a storage room belowdecks. The Director wasn’t difficult to find; one only had to follow the trail of curses. He had been stored near the noisy steam engines -- still running to generate heat -- so to be heard he must have been cursing quite loudly indeed.  
  
The door to the temporary cell was locked. Hakkai could hear Sanzo shouting from behind it.  
  
“Motherfucker. I said, exit program. E-X-I-T, code sutra-alpha-five-eight-three-November. Fuck, fuck, FUCK!”  
  
There came some clanging noises that Hakkai hoped had nothing to do with the engines malfunctioning. Of course, if they had to do with Director Sanzo, that was not optimal, either.  
  
He set to work picking the lock. With his adventure pad not responding to erase commands, he had to do it the old-fashioned way, with a utility knife he’d found in his pocket at the start of their Experience beta. He was lucky his character had been issued one or owned one; whoever had programmed the Arctic Adventure in the Age of Exploration! Experience had been very thorough.  
  
Of course, they had also written the faulty code that had led to his and the director’s current predicament. Or even sabotaged it deliberately. Did Sanzo have enemies? Hakkai, certainly did. Or was that silly, paranoiac thinking?  
  
_Save a free thought to keep the positive alive_ , they’d told Hakkai in Rehabilitation and Reinsertion. So he thought about how he was also lucky he’d been a child with a fascination for antiques, and thus knew how to pick a manual lock. He and Kanan had played old-timey jail as children.  
  
“Pause mode, you stupid thing,” came Sanzo’s voice, muted some by the door. “Director code tenkai-ten-charlie-nine-five-two-kilo. Fucker! S-O-S. God code kilo-alpha-mary-three-oh.”  
  
Well. Hakkai now knew the director code and the god code. Not that either would do him much good in their current situation.  
  
“I’m working on it,” he told the door, quietly so as not to be discovered by his shipmates.  
  
Sanzo must have heard him either speaking or skritching at the lock. “Someone there?” he shouted. “Let me out of here, you asshole beenecks!”  
  
“I am trying,” Hakkai said, though he was by no means a BNEC. Then -- ah! The lock clicked and the latch moved appropriately. The feel of the smooth, cold iron of it under his fingertips was really quite remarkable, he thought. It seemed authentic in every way.  
  
He pushed open the door to see Director Sanzo Genjyo sitting on a bench with his arms behind his back. He was in his shirtsleeves, but despite the cold outside and his jacketless state, the skin visible on his face, neck and bared forearms was flushed.  
  
He glanced up with narrowed eyes as Hakkai entered. When he saw who it was, his shoulders sagged with visible relief and he released a _pffft_ of breath that sent his blond bangs flying out of his eyes.  
  
“Hakkai! Thank fuck it’s you. My pad’s voice control isn’t working, so use yours and get us out of here.”  
  
“Ah ha ha,” Hakkai breathed. “I’m afraid to tell you, Sanzo, that my pad is not responding to system requests either.”  
  
“Is it even on?”  
  
“Yes, it’s on,” Hakkai sighed. He was no code jockey, but he could use a pad, for goodness’ sake. He could also see that Sanzo’s hands were behind his back because he’d been manacled to the bench. “I’ve been using it to take notes. I made one, in fact, that said “Director Sanzo out of character and detained. Unable to erase his arrest.” Then I had to mop the forecastle lest I be punished as well.”  
  
“Hn. So that’s where you were. Can the techs back at base read your notes?”  
  
“Oh. I’m sorry to say that my notes go to encrypt until the beta review meeting.”  
  
“Shit!” Sanzo spat, and jerked his arms futilely at his restraints, accomplishing nothing more than making a deal of clanging noise. That must have been the sound Hakkai had heard earlier, when he’d wondered about the state of their engines.  
  
Hakkai hid a smile. He hoped he hid his smile. Really, it served Sanzo right for telling the captain to go fuck himself. Didn’t he realize that on a naval vessel, the captain was the god? Especially here, in the “past.”  
  
“I must tell you, the attention to period details so far has been phenomenal,” he said.  
  
“Damned historians,” Sanzo muttered and jerked at his restraints once more.  
  
Hakkai took pity; Sanzo was liable to injure himself if he wasn’t released soon. And Hakkai did owe him, and rather liked him to boot. Perhaps even a little more than was appropriate for a supervisor/contractor relationship. He raised his utility knife. “I can probably help you with those shackles, if you like.”  
  
Sanzo glared at him but shifted accordingly, facing the far wall and exposing his bound hands. Hakkai bent down and got to work trying to jimmy the shackles open. Sanzo had already injured himself; he would have bruised and chafed wrists in the scenario, at least until they could figure out how to erase, pause, or exit.  
  
Sanzo jerked when Hakkai bumped their fingers together in his work. “Stay still,” Hakkai warned.  
  
He could see Sanzo taking a deep breath, likely trying to release tension. If he hyperventilated or had a heart attack in the scenario, would the medical monitors at base take note and exit them?  
  
“I should be able to go out of character whenever the hell I want,” Sanzo muttered.  
  
Normally such should have been true; adventurers in participant mode were given leeway to edit their Experiences to their own comfort, though they were encouraged not to because it often came at the cost of Experience accuracy or even story. Of course some people probably paid a lot of money to make trouble for background non-Experience constructs, who were, after all, not real.  
  
“That depends on the scenario working properly. Which it doesn’t seem to be,” Hakkai murmured. “So perhaps we should co-productivize another plan?”  
  
“Whatever. Thanks,” Sanzo said when the manacles clinked and he was released. He rubbed his wrists for a moment, then dug in one of his trouser pockets for his own pad. He plinked commands into it with deft fingers moving too fast for Hakkai to see what he was doing.  
  
“Is it working?”  
  
Sanzo ignored him. “Respond, fuckers. Respond. Goddamn,” he grumbled. At the total lack of electronic response he whipped back his arm as if to dash his pad against the wall, but Hakkai reacted quickly enough to hold his wrist still. Sanzo’s skin was warm. Hakkai even felt a pulse. Remarkable.  
  
“If I may suggest, Sanzo, assimilation, and then productiviztion rather than destruction.” The pads were only code, like the rest of it, but they were the scenario’s proper interface. “Any data we gather even in fault mode could be vital.”  
  
“Like I don’t know that. And don’t touch me,” Sanzo said, jerking his wrist out of Hakkai’s grip.  
  
“My pardon.” Hakkai drew back his hand, fingers opened. They tingled a little. Everything tingled. Those splendid, monstrous ice cliffs above, in an intact Artic. The clothing, the arrest, the door, Sanzo. He’d never been in an Experience as realistic as this. He was lucky Gojyo had helped him get this job as historical consultant. Three Aspects was a very successful business for a reason. “It’s not even real, is it?”  
  
It was said more for himself than as excuse, but Sanzo snorted. “Like I don’t know that either. And I’m in charge.”  
  
“Yes. Director,” Hakkai said.  
  
Gojyo had warned him that Sanzo could be difficult to work with. His exact words had been, “he’s a total dick.” Hakkai couldn’t completely disagree, but he found Sanzo’s abrasiveness more fascinating than infuriating. The man was a visionary, or at least had learned how to surround himself with people of personality and skill, despite his personal manner.  
  
Hakkai joined Sanzo on the bench. Sanzo appeared to dig in his pockets for a moment for something else he couldn’t find, then gave up and began to swipe idly at his pad once more. “So. Assimilation, huh? Do I have to hide or pretend to be captive until they … what, flog me? You’re the historian. Do they still whip people in the -- the whatever year this is supposed to be?”  
  
“Flogging was not banned in the British Royal Navy until … 1879? But I don’t think they would, truthfully. This is a vehicle of exploration, not of war. Not anymore.”  
  
“We’ll have to make sure. None of our customers get flogged unless the sick fucks ask for it.”  
  
Hakkai chuckled. “A sellable bonus, not a fault?”  
  
“Tch.” Sanzo was not in the mood for levity. Hakkai wondered if he ever was, and if so, what a Sanzo doused in drollness might be like. “No, I don’t wanna take any notes. Wait. Status within parameters? Not fucking likely.”  
  
“We’re on schedule, as far as I can tell,” Hakkai murmured.  
  
“You read it?”  
  
“Of course!” Hakkai had researched the salient points of the 19th century and read the script. Most of it. He’d been determined to do his job to the best of his abilities. Mostly. “Er. Except the script ending.”  
  
Sanzo snorted. “Yeah? Here’s a spoiler: everyone dies of starvation, hypothermia and lead poisoning. With some cannibalism thrown in.”  
  
Hakkai fought keep his stare very neutral. He was the historian, after all, as Sanzo had pointed out. The 1854 Franklin expedition to locate the Northwest Passage through the Arctic Americas to Asia had indeed been a failure, if one was counting lives, since there had been no survivors. But it had been a brave venture and a well-publicized failure in its time. Hakkai preferred happy endings in his fiction. “Well, yes. But I assumed the story team would have used artistic license to develop some particularly heroic moments at the climax.”  
  
“We’ll see,” Sanzo mumbled. “It won’t even show me the timeline.”  
  
“Oh!” Hakkai pulled his pad out of his jacket pocket. “I saved a copy of the timeline in my notes. For commentary in the margins.”  
  
Sanzo grabbed the pad out of Hakkai’s hand. He swiped at the screen a couple of times and when it failed to respond, Hakkai _tsk_ ed and pressed his thumb on the reader. The screen lit up. His notes were intended to be independent of the Director beta, but then he supposed these were extraordinary circumstances.  
  
Sanzo thumbed through the timeline very quickly, giving no indication that he was reading Hakkai’s confidential notes. Polite, for him. “When is the next cut scene?”  
  
“If I recall, we experience “realtime” through this storm, which ends the day after tomorrow. I know that because I was particularly looking forward to the blizzard. We break ice and then cut scene to winter anchorage near Beechey Island. Which is …” Sanzo expanded the map without being asked, and Hakkai pointed at a tiny dot next to a larger dot. He felt a small, sharp squeeze in his chest: all those lands were gone -- melted or sunken -- in the real world. “There.”  
  
“Middle of fucking nowhere. Cut scene’ll be the time,” Sanzo said. He handed the pad back to Hakkai.  
  
Before he could explain his words, however, the door creaked open behind them and a shipmate poked his head in. It was Tommy Sahm. Hakkai had seen him before and talked with him a little. Only a very little; Tom had a tendency to giggle and act sly. Mostly he was memorable for his silvery hair and delicate features with a red burn scar over one eye. That, and his strange behavior.  
  
“You’re not s’posed to be here,” he said in a sing-song voice.  
  
“It’s all right, Tom,” Hakkai said, and he heard Sanzo mumble _you memorized their damned names?_ from behind him. Hakkai smiled. “My friend Sanzo suffers from … episodes. I was checking on him.”  
  
“Episodes? Why, that’s terribly unfortunate,” Tom said, tittering.  
  
Hakkai could almost feel Sanzo’s glare boring holes into the back of his head. “Do you think the captain would talk to us? Mister Sanzo would like to apologize most wholeheartedly.”  
  
“Apologize? Fuck that,” Sanzo said, unable to contain himself any longer.  
  
Tom laughed at that. “I’d like to see that. I suppose he might, if you were very nice.”  
  
What an odd fellow. Hakkai fixed his smile more tightly in place and turned it upon Sanzo. “We discussed assimilation, correct?”  
  
After a long moment, Sanzo sighed and rolled his glare off to the side. “Fine. You’re fucking creepy when you smile, you know that? But I don’t co-prod, I direct.”  
  
“My, but you talk funny,” Tom said, crooking an eyebrow. When Sanzo glared at him, he pouted and turned to shout at the passageway. “Send word for the Cap’n!”  
  
That was even odder; BNECS were programmed to not notice language usage, as long as the language was a known one. Neither were they programmed to notice appearance, race, sex, gender presentation, or any similar parameters that might affect clients’ Experiences, even if adventured in a time period such as this one where those things would have mattered. History could be brutal. This was a strange, if exhilarating, scenario.  
  
“Code is obviously fucked. Someone at base had better damned well notice,” Sanzo said. “Knew I should’ve brought Goku.”  
  
Goku was Sanzo’s personal assistant, and though Sanzo kept him busy, he sometimes joined the code team as well. But he wasn’t the team’s true crack genius. “What about Gojyo?”  
  
“Hn. I don’t beta with Gojyo. Would’ve tried to strangle him four or five times already.”  
  
Gojyo could be rather … insouciant. “I suppose I’m lucky, then,” Hakkai murmured.  
  
Sanzo didn’t answer him. He was staring at the door. “I’ve seen that guy before,” he said in a low voice.  
  
“Of course you have. He’s part of the scenario.”  
  
“Hn,” was all Sanzo said to that logic.  
  
A minute or two later, Captain Crozier himself bustled into the room. Hakkai noted again how faithfully he’d been recreated from his surviving portrait, with his dark hair and portly features. He held himself with appropriate pomposity and yet practically oozed a feeling of “old, grizzled sailor.”  
  
“Commander Franklin has decreed that there is to be no cursing or drunkenness on this vessel, Mister Sanzo,” the captain said, once Sanzo had grated out an apology.  
  
“I understand,” Sanzo said. There was a significant pause, during which Hakkai nudged him with his elbow. Sanzo choked out the appropriate “Sir.”  
  
Captain Crozier nodded. “Very well. You shall have double watches for your transgression. We’ll need all hands when this storm is over.”  
  
Second-class seaman Sanzo was thus restored to normal operations. He groused a little at the work but it was not much more than an inconvenience: Experiences were entertainment, after all, and their bodies were not programmed for exhaustion. And “realtime” was created only by the program and their implants. Experience guidelines did suggest keeping a circadian rhythm, both for assimilation and mental health.  
  
Mostly Sanzo used his off-time to fiddle with his pad, doing something he did not see fit to share. His refusal to plan together did not bother Hakkai in the slightest; his own expertise lay in study of the past, not in the technical aspects of Experiences. Best to worry about what he could.  
  
And the storm was everything Hakkai could have wished. The winds howled ceaselessly, the air was frigid and laced with ice, and the snow drifted so deeply on deck that Hakkai could have buried himself in it or built an igloo -- if he hadn’t been detailed to keep shoveling it over the sides.  
  
He spent as much time above as he could, even off watch, enjoying the freezing tempest. Sanzo sometimes joined him.  
  
One such time Hakkai stood at the railing, tapping notes into his pad, while Sanzo hovered silent beside him, looking out at skies so thick they could not even signal their sister ship _Erebus_. Hakkai entered into his notes his appreciation for the worn look of the buckles on their oilskin deck jackets, and the handwritten documents on paper -- of all things -- that displayed the skill of their writers and surprising readability. However, one of his shipmates had mentioned the Civil War raging in United States, and that wouldn’t begin for another ten years. And Sanzo carried a pistol that was much more modern than it should have been.  
  
“I’m the director. I make special requests,” he’d said when Hakkai had queried him about it.  
  
While Hakkai typed, Sanzo pulled out a pouch of what appeared to be rolls of tobacco, chose one and shoved it between his lips, then fought the wind to light it. His lighter was also too modern. “Bartered smokes from one of those beenecks in the dogwatch,” Sanzo offered at Hakkai’s questioning glance.  
  
“Barter! Almost total assimilation,” Hakkai smiled. He watched Sanzo inhale from the burning roll, then exhale smoke. “You seem drawn to the cold, as I am.”  
  
Sanzo smoked and stared out at the grey and blessedly icy white nothing. “I hate the heat,” he said at last.  
  
Hakkai did as well. Gojyo didn’t mind it so much, had grown up in the wilds outwall. He often joked that his skin was so tanned and his hair so red because he’d been set on fire by nature more than once.  
  
“I’m pleased that cold is back in fashion,” Hakkai said. “A few weeks ago I Experienced “Daring and Doom on Mount Everest,” by the Yee-Soh Company.”  
  
“Oh. Them,” Sanzo said with a lip-curl beneath the smoke. When he didn’t elaborate on his disdain, Hakkai continued.  
  
“It was not as thorough an immersion as this, but then I did only the short version and in spectator mode. The scenery was quite lovely.” The writers had posited that Mallory and Irvine had reached the summit in 1924 -- almost thirty years before the official ascent by Hillary and Norgay -- before falling to their deaths. It had been a wonderful Experience, though some of the historical inconsistencies had made Hakkai a little twitchy. “But the cameras and boots were not correct at all!”  
  
Sanzo uttered a _hnf_ that might have been a half-laugh. “Disasters are fashionable, too. People love to romanticize sh-- stuff like this.”  
  
Hakkai took off his glasses to wipe them free of ice. He spent a lot of time doing that. His items were all period-specific, and he loved touching them. He replaced them on his nose. “Can you believe that, historically, people used to take vacations to warm places?”  
  
“Insanity,” Sanzo said. He didn’t quite smile, but his thin lips were turned more up than down. It gave his face an entirely different character, a certain amount of charm. Hakkai decided to take advantage of the moment.  
  
“You mentioned the cut scene might be significant?”  
  
Sanzo inhaled and then exhaled more smoke before answering. “When there’s a cut, it’s not seamless. There’s a millisecond or two of nothing while the scene is recreated. Gives your brain time to adjust to the new input. It’s also a pause to the system and the coders have to keep an eye on it. I set my pad to burst all system requests on repeat, starting tomorrow at oh-five-hundred hours, scenario time. Someone’ll notice. They’d better.”  
  
“I’ll be ready, then. Though I’ll be a bit disappointed to leave all this behind.” At Sanzo’s wide-eyed glare, Hakkai laughed. “I suppose it’ll be safer once the fault has been isolated and corrected, but I must admit the uncertainty has added an element of live-in-the-moment, of … danger, even, that is refreshing.”  
  
“I’ve heard you’re that type,” Sanzo said after a few moments.  
  
“Ah hah hah.” Hakkai wondered how much Sanzo knew about his past; the events of … surrounding Kanan had happened on the other side of Earth, and supposedly once he’d gone through R &R, he’d been given a clean slate. As long as he was consistently employed in his trained field, checked in with his agents, and behaved, supervision by the government was minimal.  
  
But it had been a dark time and he’d … murdered, yes, many members of an influential gang. Hakkai remembered more of it than they thought he did. Nothing had been publicized, but there were always rumors and legends that worked their way between the walled cities. People did love their disasters, it was true.  
  
“Tell you what,” Sanzo said, his lips still turned up around his papered tobacco. He pulled out his pistol. “You want danger? If the system burst didn’t work, I was gonna use this on you first, then me. How’s that get you living?”  
  
“Very well, thanks,” Hakkai said, an understatement. His belly tingled; at that moment Sanzo was more than attractive, with the gleam in his eyes matching the gleam of ship lantern on his pistol. Why did he, Hakkai, always go for the unhinged ones? He also rather wondered why Sanzo hadn’t tried the gun solution first.  
  
“Yeah? Don’t get off on it yet. This whole thing isn’t supposed to be dangerous. But when the brain stops providing feedback, the system definitely notices.”  
  
“We’ll wake up at corporate. Safe and sound,” Hakkai said.  
  
Sanzo narrowed his eyes. “We’ll see,” he said.  
  
Sudden sweat broke out on Hakkai’s neck. He schooled his expression to hide his excitement, the racing of his heart. He raised his eyebrows slowly and tilted his head.  
  
“I heard you give the god code, by the way,” he said.  
  
“You haven’t done anything with it.”  
  
“We’ll see,” Hakkai said.  
  
Sanzo merely stared at him and smoked. “So. Did you look at Henry Maoh like that?” he said after long moments.  
  
Ah; Sanzo did know about Hakkai’s past. Some of it, at least. Hakkai honestly found it a relief not to have to pretend he didn’t have any memory of it.  
  
“Briefly,” he said, then smiled again.  
  
Sanzo choked out a lungful of smoke on what might have been a laugh. “Godda--you’re a creepy bastard,” he said.  
  
“My apologies.”  
  
“Don’t bother,” Sanzo said and shook his head. Before Hakkai could ponder the significance of that, a pair of crew members emerged onto the deck. These Hakkai did not know, and he wondered how he could possibly have missed them. One was slight and … fey, Hakkai supposed he could describe him, and was dressed in relentless black. By contrast, his companion was a tall, muscle-bound fellow. Whoever they were, they caught sight of Sanzo’s pistol.  
  
“Coo’ee, that’s a fancy piece for a sailor,” the fey man said, his eyes wide and admiring.  
  
“It’s for polar bears,” Sanzo said, his expression unchanged. There was a moment of surprised silence, then the big man nodded.  
  
“Rifle’d do ye better,” he said.  
  
“Mind your own d-- I mean, stupid business,” Sanzo said.  
  
The men looked at each other and seemed to shrug. They hunched into their coats and wandered off into the storm. Sanzo watched them go. Then he stowed his pistol and tossed his smoke-end over the railing. “Seen them before, too,” he told Hakkai, and with that, he wandered off as well.  
  
***  
  
The morning did not dawn, exactly, since they were still in fall twilight, but with the end of the storm the skies were clear and breathtaking and there was a good deal of ice to be broken away from the _Terror_. Rather than working, however, Hakkai and Sanzo found a quiet corner belowdecks to await the end of their adventure. Their rescue, rather. And it was not exactly quiet: around them the ship groaned and creaked as it contracted and fought the ice that trapped it.  
  
Hakkai had only joined Experiences for recreation and had never noticed the pauses Sanzo mentioned, nor the adjustments to his brain. Being forewarned, he wondered if he might notice this time. He held his breath as the seconds counted down--  
  
Between one moment and the next there was a change in the quality of the sound of the ship, and Hakkai felt the sudden sway of her around them. Something else was odd: they were sitting exactly where they’d been waiting to see if Sanzo’s plan had worked and yet … Hakkai also remembered going out in the boats and using those marvelous old, iron tools to chip the ship free. He remembered the celebrations as they’d gotten underway, tempered by trepidation about spending their first long, dark winter in the Arctic. He glanced up at Sanzo, who was frowning.  
  
“You gotta be--” Sanzo began to say, but halted when their pads both buzzed and flashed “NEW MESSAGE.” They both hit _play message_. Hakkai’s fingers were stiff, he noticed.  
  
“Hey, sorry--” came Goku’s voice from Sanzo’s pad, then a deal of crackle and static. “--working on it.”  
  
“--ing on it,” finished Hakkai’s pad a second later.  
  
“Goddamn. Fuck it, fuck this, I’m done with it,” Sanzo said, obviously done with assimilation as well, and began to poke commands at his pad so violently it seemed he could break it with his fingers.  
  
“What are you-- whoah!” Hakkai said, as months passed. It was late winter, and they were standing on deck in a clear, moonless night that was lit by more stars than Hakkai had ever seen; of course he’d viewed the feeds from satellites above the choked atmosphere, but this sky had a weight and depth that nearly gave him vertigo. He exhaled and the ice crystals in his breath seemed to float up to join the heavens, boiling on into a star-strewn forever--  
  
\--He blinked and suddenly it was grey daytime and they were standing on a barren, rocky and icy coast, staring at piles of stones: the graves of those who’d perished. Sanzo was standing next to him, and he was thin, too thin, with sunken cheeks and circles under his eyes, and--  
  
Hakkai blinked again and he was on his back in some smoky place and the man who’d found him, the dark-skinned man with a rounded face, was speaking to him in a language he did not know. He heard Sanzo croak from somewhere nearby, “Assholes … they’re running--”  
  
And Hakkai opened his mouth to tell Sanzo to save his strength, that they were rescued, but between one breath and the next Hakkai was submerged in icy, murky water and he couldn’t see which way was up or down and it was like floating in that endless, heavy sky. He couldn’t breathe and was going numb but it was rather nice, anyway, and then--  
  
He was floating. He was floating and breathing recycled air in a white room with white padded benches. Before each bench sat white tables with electronic screens set into them. He was wearing a form-fitting black bodysuit.  
  
_Is this some sort of Experience afterlife?_ Hakkai wondered. Perhaps he should have read the script through to the end after all.  
  
“Where the hell are we now?” he heard Sanzo bitch, croak-free. “Exit immediately, code sutra-alpha-five-eight-three-November. Oh, fuck it.”  
  
Hakkai float-turned to see Sanzo behind him, clutching a protrusion of some sort near the ceiling -- a pipe, perhaps? -- to hold himself steady in the zero-gee-like atmosphere. He was wearing a similar bodysuit to Hakkai’s, one that showed he was thin but not nearly as thin as he’d been mere moments ago. Or years? Years that had passed in moments. Hakkai felt them, felt … older, like he’d lived the whole thing, though he also realized they’d just been sitting in the hold, waiting for rescue from corporate.  
  
Very odd. Hakkai shook his head to clear it, then floated over to join Sanzo.  
  
“What happened? I was just …” he began, but couldn’t find the words to say what he felt. Which hadn’t been real, anyway. “Er.”  
  
“Those assholes were fucking with the code and ran the scenario on fast forward,” Sanzo said with a scowl. He began to pat himself down with his free hand. His pad floated from a lanyard strung around his neck, so likely he was looking for tobacco or his specially requested pistol.  
  
“Or maybe you triggered something when you were abusing your pad?” Hakkai murmured.  
  
“At least we’re off that fucking ship,” was Sanzo’s answer.  
  
Hakkai took a few moments to look around. The benches were charmingly rounded and their plass-upholstery gleamed. There were cup holders set into the bench arms, but the half-emptied bottles of beverage they’d likely held were floating around with him and Sanzo, along with various small electronics. The screens were two-D only. Everything in the room seemed slightly old-fashioned, like it might have belonged to his grandparents’ generation, but compared to the time from which he’d come, it was jarringly modern. He must have been more immersed than he’d thought in life on the _Terror._ Or perhaps his brain had not had its natural moments to readjust? Regardless, Hakkai wanted to close his eyes, hold his breath, and make it all go away. _Recycled-tasting air_ … “Though it seems we may be on another ship?”  
  
“Yeah. We’ve been dumped in another scenario. I’m not sure which …”  
  
Just then a voice spoke over some sort of shipwide transmission system. “It seems gravity is gone! Oops. Hold on, friends, ‘cause I don’t think we can restore it before we make moonfall. Emphasis on the fall.”  
  
“Shit, shit, shit,” Sanzo said. “We’re on _Terror III_.”  
  
“The mission to survey Europa? That crashed? Er. That will be …” Hakkai tried to remember what he’d been taught about the mission. Icy moon of Jupiter. Far from the sun. “Very cold?”  
  
“Tch. That all you got, historian?”  
  
Hakkai adjusted his glasses. His nineteenth-century spectacles had been replaced with a more modern, sleek pair, and he found them a little constrictive. “My expertise lies mostly in pre-twentieth-century history, as you must know. I’m sure you read my CV.”  
  
“Don’t smirk at me like that. I don’t know shit about this scenario. We outsourced the story as part of the Exploration series. Last I heard, it wasn’t even to beta-stage yet.”  
  
As if on cue, the chamber in which they floated blinked and frizzled. Then it reasserted itself and gleamed its former steady, sanitary white.  
  
Who knew for how long? If they were ejected into space by a half-existing ship in an airless, cold void made entirely of code, would their coded bodies asphyxiate horribly? Hakkai’s spine tingled.  
  
“Um.” He nabbed the pad floating about his own neck out of the air and pulled up the menu. He tried _escape, pause_ , and _exit_ ; nothing happened. He was able to access a timeline, however. “We’re … scientists on the _Terror III_. I do hope they haven’t named any more ships that? Anyway, we’re probably here at mark 2105.3.6.25:22, right after the approximately four-millimeter asteroid blew a hole through our main engines.”  
  
Before Sanzo could look where Hakkai was pointing on his pad, the voice over the loudspeaker returned. “Attention,” it said, in amused-sounding tones. “If you’re not an engineer trying to futilely save our asses, and you have someone to fuck, I suggest you do it now.”  
  
“Er. Did they really say that? They didn’t teach us that in school,” Hakkai said, scrolling.  
  
“Who the hell knows?” Sanzo said. He began to pat himself down again, and again came up empty. “This isn’t even supposed to be living on the same server. Why did they dump us here? Why didn’t they just pull us out?”  
  
“There must be a reason,” Hakkai said. He gave up on finding anything in the timeline other than _fight for survival_ , and released his pad to let it float around his neck. “If you can’t find your firearm, we could just. Ah. Strangle each other, I suppose?”  
  
“I … don’t think that would be a good idea anymore,” Sanzo muttered, not looking Hakkai in the eyes.  
  
Hakkai shivered deliciously. So. Something was indeed going on. He and Sanzo had never discussed it as more than a fault, but Hakkai had wondered back on _Terror_ (I) if their situation could have been the result of a deliberate sabotage. He’d dismissed the idea as silly or egoistic, but the fact remained that right where their bodies waited to be awoken, something was going on that prevented them from being so. Enemies. His?  
  
“There’s a bigger problem at corporate than we suspected. I hope they’re all right?” Hakkai suggested in a low voice.  
  
“Starting to wonder myself,” Sanzo said. Despite his worrying words, his tone and demeanor were unchanged from his heavy-lidded, bored expression.  
  
“So what should we do?” Hakkai prodded further.  
  
“We wait. Goddamn, I wish I had a smoke at least. Assholes.”  
  
It seemed Sanzo did not want to elaborate. Hakkai began to grow warm in his armpits and belly.  
  
Experiences has become popular because of their educational and entertainment value -- they offered escapism in a worn-down world -- and also because they were seen as consequence-free zones. The government installed interfaces at birth, anymore, and they could track people in real time and physically. But they still couldn’t read people’s thoughts. Not even the most skilled code-jockey could tell what one had been doing in their virtual playlands. They could only provide the framework.  
  
The downside was that one’s body lay vulnerable -- in a comfortable bed, it was true -- while its consciousness roamed the playland.  
  
Hakkai guessed they had approximately twenty minutes before the crash onto the moon’s surface. There would be survivors, of course. For a while. They’d hang on until just before rescue came a month later, from the redirected Titan expedition. Disasters were in fashion, after all. _Save a free thought to keep the positive alive!_  
  
“Well, then. Why don’t we do what they say?” he asked.  
  
“What?”  
  
Hakkai tilted his head and looked steadily at Sanzo. “Fuck.”  
  
That got Sanzo’s attention: his eyes widened and his jaw fell open. “You’re serious?”  
  
“It could be considered assimilation. Back in “Victorian Arctic Adventure,” you seemed amenable,” Hakkai said.  
  
Sanzo’s cheeks pinked and his lip began to curl, but rather than give Hakkai the curse-laced tongue-lashing he deserved, he merely rolled his eyes. “When we get out of here, you’re fired. After that, we’ll see.”  
  
“Ah hah hah,” Hakkai said, unable to help it. He grinned.  
  
“But first we have to get out.” Sanzo gave him another eyeroll for good measure, then sighed. “I guess we should talk about that.”  
  
“Co-productivization?”  
  
“Something like that.” Sanzo waved him off. “Look. This isn’t supposed to happen. We shouldn’t be unable to exit; there are failsafes built into the system. You can always exit.”  
  
“Always?” Hakkai asked, carefully. That didn’t sound good. The history of brain-assisted electronic reality was riddled with development errors and perhaps even a coma or two, long ago, but that was all. That he knew of. If they were ejected into space by a half-existing ship in an airless, cold void made entirely of code, would their coded bodies asphyxiate horribly forever if they couldn’t exit the scenario?  
  
“Our company doesn’t design shit that you can’t end when you want. Fuck. Okay,” Sanzo said, taking a breath and looking at Hakkai steadily. “Not long ago, we were approached by salesjerks with new technologies. We turned them down. Not everyone on the board agreed with that, and things were pretty shitty on both sides. I’m starting to wonder if what’s happening isn’t related.”  
  
Hakkai digested that for a few moments. Corporate rivalries were as ubiquitous as development errors. And ever since computers had been invented, hackers had been right behind them. Perhaps it truly wasn’t all about him. “So grid-busters have been attacking Three Aspects Experiences?”  
  
“Grid-busters are always attacking somebody. It might be … inside work.”  
  
“Not Gojyo. Or Goku,” Hakkai said immediately. He knew for certain that Gojyo would not betray him, especially not after he’d invested so much time helping him become functional again. And Goku … perhaps Hakkai simply liked him because of some personal judgment, but the way Goku hovered around Sanzo, trying to keep him happy, the way he snuck fresh fruit into Sanzo’s office -- Hakkai couldn’t imagine that Goku would deliberately turn traitor to Sanzo.  
  
“No,” Sanzo agreed, frowning. “There’ve been a lot of new hires, though.”  
  
“Including myself.”  
  
Sanzo shifted his shoulder in which might have been a shrug. “I’m not worried about you.”  
  
“That’s heartening,” Hakkai said, too soon. Around them, the ship began to make some alarming clanking and hissing noises. It might have been tumbling through space, but without gravity or viewports to the outside, it was hard to tell. The atmosphere did seem to have grown warmer. “So is there true risk involved?”  
  
“I don’t know. Anyway. That’s what I have.”  
  
Hakkai chose his next words carefully. “You know some about what I have …”  
  
“Yeah.” Sanzo’s lips had turned up again in that not-quite smile. “Maybe you didn’t kill enough people? Cut off all the dragon’s heads? Your CV did seem too good to be true.”  
  
_Well. That had escalated quickly_. “That’s not on my CV,” Hakkai protested, hardly able to breathe as his lungs tensed.  
  
“It’s on the one I acquired. Look. Someone up high was thrilled with what you did.”  
  
“I wasn’t. It was terrible,” Hakkai said. Lied. His whole body, his every nerve and muscle, was humming with adrenaline and awareness. Sanzo knew. He knew, and he didn’t care.  
  
In R &R they’d emphasized finding what was inside oneself that was broken and rebuilding it. Forgetting the past and becoming productive. What was broken in him was a sense that personal vengeance outweighed keeping the peace in society. It was probably why he’d been so attracted to history: it was indeed brutal.  
  
And … there had been satisfying moments at points in the terribleness. Working with one’s own hands, outside the grid, just like in the old days. To let every person know why he was murdering them, to know how they’d made the mistake of hurting him, hurting Kanan, but taking her and … doing what they’d done to her. That part was blocked; it was probably for the best.  
  
Hakkai wondered if Sanzo knew what he was getting into with “after that.” He smiled again, wondering how creepy Sanzo might find it.  
  
“I must say, if you fire me, I wish you luck finding another historian who can handle these unexpected disruptions.”  
  
“Yeah?” Sanzo scratched his ear with his pinky finger as if he hadn’t a care in the world. “So. Did you know that the Maoh group had ties to Yee-Soh?”  
  
It didn’t matter that his body was made only of code, fooled by his brain and hardware and software into thinking itself real: Hakkai’s vision blurred and his ears grew so hot they must have burst into flame. The problem was about him, and he wasn’t party to the solution.  
  
“Well, now I do, and you should tell me--” he began, practically hissing, but was disrupted as the voice over the loudspeaker returned to taunt them further.  
  
“Hey, everyone! Fucking yet? If not, put on all the cold suits you can find, because what instruments are left are telling me it’s a chilly minus-one-oh-two-C on Europa.”  
  
“This is just getting fucking ridiculous,” Sanzo said.  
  
Before Hakkai could respond, could use his not-real fingers to grab Sanzo and threaten him into spilling the truth, there was yet another disruption: the door to their chamber unsealed with a whooshing sound. A man with green-tinted hair, wearing a body suit similar to theirs, floated into the room. He waved.  
  
“Greetings, subordinates! We’re going to the number three cargo hold -- it’s reinforced and may help us to survive the horrendous crash that will surely kill you -- I mean, us -- anyway.”  
  
“I’ve definitely seen you before,” Sanzo said. He patted himself down one last time, growled at whatever he didn’t find, then gave himself a mighty push off the wall with his legs, launching himself arms-out at the man.  
  
The man’s eyes widened, but Sanzo was fast and had his fingers around the man’s neck before he could escape.  
  
“Asshole! What the hell are you doing here?” Sanzo was shouting.  
  
“Hah! Don’t be foolish. I’m your team leader-- gack!”  
  
Sanzo must have squeezed. “Bullshit!” he said.  
  
Someone jerked violently and the two of them rolled through the air, Sanzo with a choke-hold and the man trying to pry his arms away. Then the entire room -- the ship, the scenario?-- fizzle-blinked again. When it returned, the man was free and floating about a meter out of Sanzo’s grasp. He grinned wildly.  
  
“Mutiny! This is mutiny, I say!”  
  
Watching Sanzo attempt some good, old-fashioned physical violence had drained Hakkai of some of his tension. “I hardly think attacking the BNECs will help--”  
  
“Fucker’s no beeneck. He’s a new hire,” Sanzo said. Then, as if by magic, he pulled his pistol out of a pocket in his sleeve. It looked old-fashioned here. “About fucking time they got their heads out of their asses.”  
  
He fired, _pow!_ The man blinked out of existence, then reappeared, bullet-hole-free. Sanzo fired again and this time the man disappeared and reappeared above him. Sanzo snapped his arm up and aimed almost too quickly for Hakkai to see, and fired again. The man _poof_ ed away once more. Sanzo shot off three more rounds, swift and skilled with the gun but not quick enough to catch the man as he appeared and disappeared around the room, _poof, pow, poof, pow, poof, pow!_  
  
The man materialized in the door and saluted them. “If you don’t want to go, then the freeze will have you. Ha ha hee!” he laughed, and then he was gone, the door _whoosh_ ing shut behind him.  
  
His laugh was indeed ridiculous but also infectious: Hakkai’s diaphragm bubbled with answering laughter at the absurdity of it all. Then his stomach twisted and rolled as the ship definitely began to tumble through its nonexistent space. The room spun about them and Hakkai had to dodge the floating bottles and bits. Something structural began to scream under metallic stress.  
  
Hakkai had never vomited in electronic reality before. But if anyone deserved to be vomited upon, it was Sanzo. He kicked off from the wall and waved his arms and legs, like swimming clumsily through the thinning air -- had Sanzo shot a hole in the ship, or was the spinning creating an artificial gravity that pulled all the oxygen to the perimeters of the room? It didn’t really matter.  
  
He slammed into Sanzo and grabbed his wrist. He felt a mad pulse under his fingers.  
  
“Sanzo. You need to explain this very instant,” he said.  
  
Sanzo flailed and gripped Hakkai’s shoulder in return. “That’s--”  
  
The next moment, everything was still and black. Hakkai realized that it was black because his eyes were closed. He opened them to see Sanzo sitting up next to him, no longer in his jumpsuit but wearing his white, loose Experience gear. He was yanking the connector out of his interface.  
  
“--that’s Director Sanzo to you,” he finished.  
  
Corporate. Home. They were … they’d exited, or been brought out. Hakkai took a moment to reacclimate, to take a deep breath of real air. His heart was racing and a ghost of nausea still hovered about his stomach, but mostly he felt … surprisingly well and normal. Well-rested, even. Technology was a wonderful thing.  
  
“I thought I was fired?” he said, scrabbling his fingers in the hair behind his ear to disconnect his own interface.  
  
“Oh, yeah,” Sanzo said. He stumbled a little as he stepped over to one of the drawers lining the wall of the Experience booth. Just as he yanked it open and began to rummage through it, Goku came tearing into the room.  
  
“Told him, told him we had to get you the gun, hah! That was all me, I swear it--”  
  
“Hey, I totally carried your asses down the hall in a chip, goddamn--”  
  
That was Gojyo, tall and fire-headed as ever, sauntering into the room behind Goku.  
  
Goku glared at Gojyo and groaned. “We had to shift ‘em off-server. But that was totally filled with bogied code. How were we supposed to know?”  
  
“Someone tell me what the hell is going on!” Sanzo and Hakkai shouted, in near-unison.  
  
Gojyo and Goku gaped between them, as if not sure whose retribution to fear more. Finally Goku turned a wide-eyed and excited gaze upon Sanzo. “Grid busters,” he said.  
  
“We think they’re inside the complex,” Gojyo added.  
  
“We were both right,” Hakkai noted.  
  
Sanzo offered Hakkai a brief nod, then went back to digging through the cabinets. “Hn. And what are we doing about it?”  
  
Gojyo and Goku glanced at each other, then Gojyo spoke first. “ED’s offsite, but is gettin’ guys to cover the perimeter.  
  
Goku beamed. “And us, we got ‘em looped into their own shit. It was beemis.”  
  
“You’re not supposed to know about beemis,” Sanzo said.  
  
Goku snickered. “Yeah, right.”  
  
“Beemis?” Hakkai asked.  
  
Gojyo grinned at Hakkai and leaned against the counter, shifting only a little when Sanzo shooed him out of the way. “Brain-electronic-meld interface software. Some new, bizarre shit Yee-soh’s trying to get on the market. They say it’s supposed to enhance ER, but I think it lets ‘em into your head.”  
  
“You’re not supposed to know that either,” Sanzo noted.  
  
Ah. Hakkai suspected he was definitely not on the need-to-know list, but now he knew regardless. Another piece of the puzzle slipped into place. He hadn’t cut off all the heads. Had one come for him, or was his involvement merely coincidence? Did it matter? Probably not.  
  
Goku waved off concerns about confidentiality as trivial. “Anyway, it was weird. Like your brain waves were shuffling into the code and man, we had to do some fine-fiddling, down to the digit, to get you out and not let them exit.”  
  
Hakkai felt a tinge of nausea rise in his stomach again. “So part of my … mind could still be in there?” Part of him was still, perhaps, in Victorian Arctic Adventure, drowning. Or maybe shoveling ice from the decks. And Sanzo’s movements did seem rather clumsy … Thinking about the green-haired man freezing his testicles off on Europa, however, restored some of Hakkai’s equilibrium.  
  
“Doesn’t matter. We need to find them and eliminate them,” Sanzo said. He’d found what he was looking for in the drawers and brandished it: his pistol, a real one in the real world. It looked very, very old-fashioned in this environment, but also very, very deadly. “I’ll know ‘em when I see ‘em.”  
  
Hakkai guessed he would as well: Tommy Sahm, a fey man and a giant, and the green-haired laughing man. Plus a disembodied, smarmy voice. But more importantly: “Eliminate?” he asked.  
  
Goku pounded a fist into his other palm and smiled with teeth. “Yeah. There’s a reason Three Aspects is number one in the business. We don’t take any shit.”  
  
Well, if there was anyone in the room who was unlikely to take any shit, it was Hakkai.  _Ah._   Which perhaps explained his phantom CV, the one he hadn’t known existed.  
  
“I suppose you want me to help?” Hakkai said.  
  
Sanzo was squinting at the pistol as he loaded it, thumbing gleaming bullets into it one by one. “You were in there with me when they hit. What does that tell you?” he said.  
  
What that told Hakkai was that he was being encouraged to take his retribution into his own hands. This time, with corporate sanction. He crossed his arms and raised an eyebrow. “You’ll have to hire me again.”  
  
“What, you fired him already, you dick?” Gojyo interjected.  
  
“Mind your own goddamned business,” Sanzo griped, then stepped close to Hakkai and locked gazes with him. “How ‘bout I hire you on a freelance basis?” Sanzo asked in a low voice.  
  
Hakkai raised the other eyebrow. “With benefits?”  
  
Sanzo didn’t-quite-smile; his expression was as indifferent as ever, but his eyes were very violet and filled with obvious humor. He smelled of incense and body heat. His avatar in the scenario paled in comparison, and Hakkai wondered how he’d thought it so real at the time.  
  
“Yeah. With benefits,” Sanzo said.  
  
Hakkai laughed. “Lead on, Director,” he said.


End file.
